The third big figure among the representatives of the modern 'poetic' school is Gustav Mahler. Like the other two, he is of the 'southern wing'; like Bruckner's, his training was Viennese. Born in Kalischt (Bohemia), he went to the capital as a student in the university and the conservatory. Already at twenty he began that brilliant career as conductor which during his lifetime somewhat overshadowed his recognition as a creative artist. His first post was at Hall (Upper Austria), where he conducted a theatre orchestra; thence he went to Laibach, Olmütz, Kassel (as Vereinsdirigent); thence to Prague as conductor of the German National Theatre (1885). In 1886 he substituted for Nikisch at the Leipzig opera; two years later he became opera conductor in Budapest, 1891 in Hamburg, and 1897 returned to Vienna, first as conductor, soon after to become director of the Royal Opera, where he remained till 1907. During 1898-1900 he conducted the Philharmonic concerts as well. In 1909 he came to New York as conductor of the Philharmonic Society and remained till 1911, when failing health, perhaps aggravated by uncongenial conditions, forced him to resign. He died shortly after his return to Vienna, in the same year.
Max Reger
After a photograph from life
While still in his youth Mahler wrote an opera, 'The Argonauts,' besides songs and chamber music. A musical 'fairy play,' Rübezahl, with text by himself, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and nine symphonies, designed on a gigantic scale, constitute the bulk of his mature works. Other songs, a choral work with orchestra (Das klagende Lied), and the 'Humoresques' for orchestra nearly complete the list.
Bruckner left the problem of modern symphonic form unsolved. Brahms partly solved it in one way, by following the classical tradition on its more 'abstract' side; Strauss has partially solved it in another way, by making the 'moments' of the musical evolution of a work tally with those of a program. Mahler, on the other hand, aimed at a course which was a sort of compromise between all the others. His nine symphonies are neither abstract music nor program music in the ordinary sense of the latter word; yet they are 'programmatic' in the broad sense that in whole and in detail they are motived more or less by definite concepts of man and his life in the world. Mahler faced more clear-sightedly and consistently than any other composer of his day the problem of the combination of the vocal and the symphonic form. That this combination is full of as yet unrealized possibilities will be doubted by no one familiar with the history of music since Beethoven. In one shape or another the problem has confronted probably nine-tenths of our modern composers. Wagner found one partial solution of it in his symphonic dramas, in which the orchestra pours out an incessant flood of eloquent music, the vague emotions of which are made definite for us by the words and the stage action. The ordinary symphonic poem attempts much the same thing by means of a printed program that is intended to help the hearer to read into the generalized expression of the music a certain particular application of each emotion; we may put it either that the symphonic poem is the Wagnerian music drama without the stage and the characters, or that the Wagnerian music drama is the symphonic poem translated into visible action. But for the best part of a century the imagination of composers has been haunted by the experiment made by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, of combining actual voices with the ordinary symphonic form; it has always been felt that instrumental music at its highest tension and utmost expression almost of necessity calls out for completion in the human cry. Words are often necessary in order at once to intensify and to elucidate the vague emotions to which alone the instruments can give expression. It was the consciousness of this that impelled Liszt to introduce the chorus at the end of his 'Dante' and 'Faust' symphonies.
To a mind like Mahler's, full of striving, of aspiration, of conscious reflection upon the world, it was even more necessary that some means should be found of giving definite direction to the indefinite sequences of emotion of instrumental music. Almost from the beginning he adopted the device of introducing a vocal element into his symphonies. In the Second, a solo contralto sings, in the fourth movement, some lines from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn—'O rosebud red! Mankind lies in sorest need, in sorest pain! In heaven would I rather be!... I am from God, and back to God again will go; God in His mercy will grant me a light, will lighten me to eternal, blessed life'—while the idea of resurrection that is the theme of the music of the fifth movement is precisé by a chorus singing Klopstock's ode, 'After brief repose thou shalt arise from the dead, my dust; immortal life shall be thine.' In the fourth movement of the third symphony—the 'Nature' symphony—a contralto solo sings the moving lines, 'O Mensch, gieb Acht!' from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra; and in the sixth movement the contralto and a female choir dialogue with each other in some verses from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Five stanzas from the same poem are set as a soprano solo in the finale of the Fourth Symphony. And in the First Symphony, though the voices are not actually used, the composer, in the first and third movements, draws upon the themes of certain of his own songs (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen). In the Eighth Symphony the intermixture of orchestra and voices is so close that the title of 'symphonic cantata' would fit the work perhaps as well as that of 'symphony with voices'; here the kernel of the music is formed by the old Latin hymn Veni, creator spiritus and some words from the final scene of the second part of Goethe's Faust.
Mahler's use of the voice in the orchestra is, as will be seen, something quite different from merely singing the 'program' of the work instead of printing it. His aim is the suggestion of symbols rather than the painting of realities. Even where, on the face of the case, it looks at first as if his object had been a realistic one, his intention was often less realistic than mystical. In the Seventh Symphony, for instance, he introduces cowbells; we have it from his own mouth that here his aim was not simply a piece of pastoral painting, but the suggestion of 'the last distant greeting from earth that reaches the wanderer on the loftiest heights.' 'When I conceive a big musical painting,' he said once, 'I always come to a point at which I must bring in speech as the bearer of my musical idea. So must it have been with Beethoven when writing his Ninth Symphony, only that his epoch could not provide him with the suitable materials—for at bottom Schiller's poem is not capable of giving expression to the "unheard" that was within the composer.' In this Mahler is no doubt right; the modern composer has a wider range of poetry to draw upon for the equivalent of his musical thought.
Mahler's form is in itself a beautiful and a rational one; and, as with all other forms, the question is not so much the 'How' as the 'What' of the music. Mahler, perhaps, never fully realized the best there was in him; fine as his music often is, it as often suggests a mind that had not yet arrived at a true inner harmony. His mind was always an arena in which dim, vast dreams of music of his own struggled with impressions from other men's music that incessantly thronged his brain as they must that of every busy conductor, and with more or less vague, poetic, philosophical and humanitarian visions. He never quite succeeded in making for himself an idiom unmistakably and exclusively his own; all sorts of composers, from Beethoven and Bruckner to Johann Strauss, seem to nod to each other across his pages. As the Germans would say, his Können was not always equal to his Wollen. His feverish energy, his excitable imagination, and his lack of concentration continually drove him to the writing of works of excessive length, demanding unusually large forces; the Eighth Symphony, for example, with its large orchestra, seven soloists, boys' choir and two mixed choirs, calls for a personnel of something like one thousand. Yet he could be amazingly simple and direct at times, as is shown by his lovely songs and by many a passage in the symphonies that have a folk-song flavor. His individuality as a symphonist is incontestable, and it is probable that as time goes on his reputation will increase. Alone among modern German composers he is comparable to Strauss for general vitality, ardor of conception, ambition of purpose, and pregnancy of theme.